BP: A power plant that reuses carbon dioxide?
Posted by Yankee on Sat Feb 11 at 7:05 PM EST
The New York Times business section has an article that starts with the following paragraph:
Subsidiaries of BP and Edison International said yesterday that they were planning to build a power plant that would run on oil residues, and that 90 percent of the carbon dioxide would be captured and pumped into an oil field, where it would help push more oil to the surface.
According to the article, the gasification process that will be used in the California plant is said to be similar to what Bush talked about in the SotU when he mentioned "zero-emission coal-fired plants".
The plant would run by mixing an oil residue, petroleum coke, in a chamber with steam and a controlled amount of oxygen. In this technique, called gasification, both the fuel and the water give up hydrogen atoms to form hydrogen gas. This process also produces carbon monoxide, which is converted to carbon dioxide, giving off heat to sustain the reaction.
The hydrogen is then burned in a turbine engine, the kind that electric companies normally run on natural gas, and the dominant combustion product is water. The carbon dioxide is compressed into a liquid and injected into an oil field.
Although the fuel is an oil residue, and not coal, the technology is the same as one mentioned by President Bush in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 31, in which he said, "We will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants."
Dave recently had a post about CO2 injection, and suggested that if were done right, it would be a step in the right direction. In the case of the BP power plant, it looks like they're looking for a partnership with Occidental Petroleum, which has oil fields in the LA area.
But there is one thing in this article that might set off a tiny red flag:
Petroleum coke from the Carson refinery is usually trucked to the harbor and shipped to China, where it is burned for fuel.
Now, I don't know much about petroleum coke. I googled it, and it seems that burning petroleum coke for fuel has become economical in the recent past, but it's not exactly environmentally friendly (link):
Increased use of heavier grades of crude, coupled with technological advances in oil refining processes, has led to increased supplies of petroleum coke. This imbalance in supply and demand has resulted in a decline in the price of petroleum coke, thus making it an attractive fuel for power generation. While it has high heat density and low ash content, which are good, it also contains large amounts of sulfur, vanadium, and other heavy metals and has a low volatile matter content, which pose some technical and environmental challenges.
Somehow, I don't find this surprising. If we're shipping it off to China instead of using it ourselves, it cannot be good stuff. Still, as I've said, I don't know much about what petroleum coke is used for, so if anyone has any more to add about petroleum coke, please do so below.
5 comments on BP: A power plant that reuses carbon dioxide?
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GreenMan on Sat Feb 11 at 9:40 PM EST
Don't all oil fields contain natural gas in some measure? And isn't that natural gas eventually either produced for sale or flared off (or separated and re-injected, to be re-produced later)?
If you inject CO2 into an oil formation, does it not mix with the natural gas present there and eventually find its way back into the atmosphere as the natural gas is extracted?
Or is there a commercial process to extract CO2 from natural gas, and then re-re-reinject it? I was under the impression that C02 and other impurities in natural gas were dealt with by mixing lower-quality gas with gas from higher-quality sources to get a more-or-less uniform product.
triphop on Sat Feb 11 at 9:53 PM EST
Yes - it might have impurities but we can store them along with the CO2. IMHO the only feasible way to get the CO2 out the atmosphere is to bio-engineer stuff that deals with it in the oceans. Some hybrid that photosynthesizes like mad. Yes, its a desperate measure.
For the demand side: What other approaches other than turning off the engines?
geo on Sat Feb 11 at 10:19 PM EST
Seriously? We will trust the energy industry to process this nasty stuff? And the government to regulate it?
A few days ago NPR had a story about a slough of new old-fashioned coal-fired plants going up and the Bushites granted clean air waivers. The CEOs maintain we need that energy now--no time for this fancy gasification/sequestration stuff--wonderful though it is.
You can take this to the bank:
As the need for coal-based energy grows more desperate, the pressure to regulate for CO2. methane, vanadium, mercury, sulfur, etc., etc. will decrease accordingly.
louGrinzo on Sat Feb 11 at 10:56 PM EST
I think we have to take into account what kind of administration is in place as more coal is used. A lot of people who (justifiably) wail about the infinite evils of the Bush crowd forget that those actions are almost universally policy reversals from Clinton. If the US can find a way to get a rational president and cabinet into power in 2009, then a lot of the insane regulations (or insane lack of regulations) can be reversed pretty quickly.
[ Parent ]
Alberta on Sat Feb 11 at 11:10 PM EST
Hello everyone,
First time posting .. but I couldn't resist since the discussion is on CO2 injection. I don't think most folks realize just how big this is going to be. There are two drivers. Obviously, the first is the need to reduce green house gases. The second, is that liquid CO2 is superior to water recovery methods in legacy oilfields.
I'm aware of one oilfield (one of a few who have recently started to use CO2 injection) in southern Saskatchewan (Canada). They are getting enhanced recovery of 15%.
I thought too that some readers not familar with the new interest in CO2 recovery, might appreciate a fairly recent article about one company that is making a major investment in this.
Here goes...
Seizing success in fields left to pasture By PATRICK BRETHOUR Sunday, December 18, 2005
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
CALGARY -- Sometimes, John Dielwart has learned, a colossal failure can be transformed into a stunning success.
Mr. Dielwart, president and chief executive officer of ARC Energy Trust, has just made a $462-million acquisition of aging oil fields, catapulting his company into a major strategic shift. The deal, which closed yesterday, positions ARC at the edge of one of the hottest prospects in the oil patch: using carbon dioxide to rejuvenate elderly oil fields where conventional production techniques have run their course, and wring millions more barrels of oil from supposedly near-empty wells.
The process is similar to rolling up a tube of toothpaste to squeeze out every last drop: The CO{-2} is pumped deep underground, where it turns to a liquid under pressure and pushes the oil from one side of a reservoir toward a wellhead, allowing more crude to be extracted.
But Mr. Dielwart has a confession to make. ARC's entry into the world of CO{-2} is founded on a failure -- a really, really big failure.
Three years ago, ARC was "incredibly close" to buying into the oil sands. The trust had bid for a stake in one megaproject, but that offer was squashed by a company that exercised its right of first refusal.
He won't divulge any names, but there is really only one candidate: The Surmont project now owned by Total SA and ConocoPhillips Co. ARC had gambled that its bid was high enough to deter anyone from elbowing its way into the deal. But the determination of the larger company to keep outsiders from entering the project convinced Mr. Dielwart that the oil sands were closed to all but the biggest players. "This is their sandbox, and we're not being allowed in."
The overall goal -- find big, stable reserves -- remained the same, but the path there would have to change. Over the following 18 months, ARC's attention began to turn to enhanced recovery using carbon dioxide.
This spring, ARC commissioned a study of the existing major oil fields in Alberta, asking for a ranking of which were best suited for an enhanced-recovery effort. A field called Redwater was at the top of the list. Discovered six decades ago, Redwater is the biggest conventional oil discovery in Western Canada, and once a major source of production. Not any more.
With the field now far past its prime, Imperial Oil Ltd. (with partner ExxonMobil Canada) put it up for sale, along with similarly aging Pembina oil fields.
Its study in hand, ARC lunged at the chance to buy assets that the entire industry thinks are 30 years past their prime. "We were poised, we were ready," Mr. Dielwart says.
The rest of the oil patch may be convinced that Redwater is 96-per-cent empty, but he believes it just might be half-full -- with a prize of up to 600 million barrels of oil if ARC can find a way to use CO{-2} to boost recovery rates.
He's not worried that many peers disagree. In fact, he's counting on it as the foundation for his acquisition strategy. "The trick is, what more do you see? What can that property become? You've got to have a vision for what the asset can become."
At first glance, ARC seems to have won only the booby prize: The fields produce more water than oil -- 167 barrels of liquid have to be pumped to come up with one barrel of crude -- and the purchase price barely makes sense even at today's high commodity prices.
The study was the final touch in a strategy that ARC had been assembling for two years -- a direction it struck off in after striking out in the oil sands. A few years ago, the bitumen deposits of northern Alberta seemed a perfect fit for ARC's goal of obtaining long-lived reserves to lend stability to its production.
During that time, two things became clear to Mr. Dielwart. The first was that the rapid increase in commodity prices was pushing the prices of oil and gas wells so high that there was little chance of wringing extra value out of any conventional acquisition. The second was that CO{-2} technology could rewrite that equation in ARC's favour.
There was no thunderclap moment of realization, just the gradual accumulation of happenstance and experience that combined to create a new ambitious strategy.
First, the happenstance. In 1997, ARC acquired a small stake in one of the few CO{-2} projects in the world, in Weyburn, Sask. The trust made the investment to add to its production, but it ended up giving ARC a front-row seat on the evolution of CO{-2} technology. Equally serendipitous was the timing of Mr. Dielwart's tenure as chairman of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. He was plunged into the middle of the wrestling match with Ottawa over the Kyoto Protocol, forcing him to focus on the likelihood that the federal government would force companies to limit greenhouse gas emissions - making it much more likely that there would be a ready supply of CO{-2}.
Then came foresight born of experience. As oil prices have risen, much of the new supplies that have come on stream are heavy grades of crude oil. Prices for that type of oil have fallen, while lighter grades -- like the kind found in Redwater -- are much more profitable.
Taken together, the pattern was clear. The economics of an effort to wring more light oil out of an aging reservoir are about to change dramatically. "The planets are all aligning," Mr. Dielwart says.
The key was to find fields with the right geological characteristics, where ARC could turn its belief in the promise of CO{-2} into reality. Mr. Dielwart is convinced Redwater is that field.
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